He found a brilliant sacrifice. I wanted to cry.

When you sit down to play a game of chess, you have no idea what's about to happen. And trust me, I really wish when I sat down here that I wouldn't have known what was about to happen. I was playing an invitational tournament in Svartahesten, a chess bar in Stockholm, and this was to honor the chess career of Ulf Andersson, who you can see sitting next to me. Anyways, in this round, I was playing against a guy called Anders, and... I've played him before. It became a little bit awkward because Yes. we'd already shaken hands and so I didn't realize we should shake again and then I didn't realize if he was telling me to start the clock or shake hands but I think he wanted to shake hands again so that was my fault. I felt so bad. I was actually thinking about this shaking hands for Like the whole game I felt so bad that I didn't shake his hand in that moment but then it was too late to do it and oh I was so awkward. Anyways this is not about that, this is about the awkward position that I already felt like I was in. Why did I feel like I was in an awkward position you might say? Because there's nothing wrong with this. Well the reason is because I have a long history of doing badly in this Opening. So here I went e6. It's a little bit passive to go e6 here, but the idea is that I'm simply defending my pawn and I'm just saying, okay, you know what, Anders, I don't want you to do anything crazy. However, it was about to get really crazy. So he went c4 here and I was kind of thinking, what should I take? Should I take one central pawn? Should I take the other central pawn? What should I do here? So here I was thinking for a little bit, where should I go? Can I take the pawn on c4? You know me, if I can take a free pawn, I always like to take free pawns, but that's not always the spirit. Do you want to share it? And so I ended up taking that pawn on c4 and he instantly went queen a4 and the idea is that he wants to recapture that pawn with the queen quite immediately. So I cannot really defend it but I decided to go bishop b7. I thought this was completely fine and now when he takes that pawn I've basically gone a lot of my pieces out. He spent two moves moving his queen to take the pawn. I was quite happy. I knew that this was fine. But now I wanted to do something to that queen. I wanted to tell the queen that it was wrong, that it was in the middle of the board. And so I found this move b5, which I thought was really cool. The idea is that if he takes the pawn on b5, I can go knight takes d4. And I'm threatening his queen at the same time as I'm winning that pawn. And that would be a really good position for me. So he cannot take the pawn. He has to move his queen now somewhere. But I thought that now I've gotten so much space on my queen side. My pawns are pushed. I'm being intimidating. I was really happy right now. I was feeling fantastic. He moved his queen to c3 and I once again felt like okay maybe there's something I can do. Maybe I can push my pawn and then go bishop b4 threatening the queen. I don't know where I was looking now. Wait why am I laughing? Why am I smiling? What is happening? Oh, I think I remember. I think someone's, yeah, something happened there. Anyways, it doesn't matter. I pushed my pawn and now I was getting ready to place my bishop on b4. I was ready to go bishop b4 and threaten that queen. I'm a queen. I think what happened was that one of the arbiters phone out of mistake rang and then the other arbiter was like ah now the arbiter is disqualified as a joke and then yeah I was laughing. Anyways um so uh bishop g5 was played now that bishop is pinning the knight and Now, I decided to simply defend that I went bishop e7. So far, nothing looks crazy, right? Like right now, I'm threatening to maybe go a4 and a5. I'm threatening to threaten the queen at the same time as I'm attacking his bishop. So far, everything is absolutely fine. But what's going to happen is that I am very soon going to feel like I'm a creative genius. And from that point, things are going to go a little bit wrong. Yeah so we traded here and then he went a4 and this I think is soon the beginning of when it started going badly. So far everything is fine. I mean here the thing is that he's threatening the pawn that is defending my c4 pawn so I cannot just push the pawn because if I do that then he's going to take my pawn. So instead I decided to simply defend. I went a6. I was now defending the b5 pawn. Everything was fine. I thought that if we trade everything is defended. No problem right now at all. So I only had five minutes left and he had quite a lot more time and for me that was the biggest problem now that I had thought for a very long time unfortunately. He went knight d2 which is a very normal move. He wants to bring out his knight. He maybe wants to bring his knight to the center and make that knight really really good and I thought okay I should probably castle before I do anything else. So I castled and like I said so far everything is fine. The king is now in safety, even though crazily enough the king was not going to be safe for much longer. But he now brought his knight to the center and this is a very natural move to do. And his idea is, one, he's kind of looking at my bishop, right? Maybe he wants to take the bishop. But two, he's also threatening to go knight c5. And that knight on c5 would be the greatest knight of all time. That knight would literally be just controlling my whole position from that square. It would be so annoying. So I thought, okay, I need to go bishop e7 to... One, stop him from taking my bishop, but two, also prevent the knight from going up to c5. It was a two-in-one move. We always like to do two-in-one moves, sometimes even three-in-one if it's possible. He now went rook d1, so this is also a very natural move, he's trying to go d5, so that's where he wants to go. And now, looking at this position right now, for me the most normal move in the world is to go knight b4. Knight b4 to go knight d5, that's the move that I would do in a heartbeat in a blitz game, I feel like. But I wanted to be, like I said, a little bit creative, and instead of going knight b4, I decided to go knight a5. And why is that move a problem? It is because my knight is kind of bad there. And so my plan was to go knight b3. My plan was to maybe go b4 and threaten the queen and defend the knight. But my knight is on the other side of the board. It is like, what can be a great comparison? Okay, let me not do a comparison now because he took my pawn. Oh yeah, it's like a bunch of birds that are all like... Flying together and they all have found a common place to find food but then one bird wants to go alone to find food somewhere else but then that bird realizes there's no food there and so it just missed out on all the food and it should have done like all the other birds did. That's kind of what my knight is doing. It's the lonely bird, my knight. So now his knights are not lonely, they're together and they're very happy and I went b4 here and this whole plan was just not so good because I'm kind of weakening all my pieces but the problem was that I couldn't go knight b3 because then he would trade my rooks and then he would go knight takes d7 and I would lose a piece so like I said if my knight was simply on b4 and I'd moved it to d5 it would be very different but now he went queen c2 and now I went bishop b5 and I was really proud of this move I thought this is great Now my bishop is defending, my bishop that has been really bad the whole game is actually quite active and my position is not bad anymore. This was a fantastic move, I was very happy now. So the main issue was that I only had a couple minutes left on the clock and he went h4, he was going to start attacking my king. Now here I thought okay let me make sure I don't Get attacked or let me make sure that nothing like terrible happens. So I was thinking, all right, can I place a pawn on h6 or f6 to stop a knight from going to g5? Because I understood that he wants to go knight g5. So I went f6 thinking that this was great. Now I'm threatening his knight. I'm basically stopping his other knight from ever going to g5. No problem whatsoever, I thought. And here, after thinking for a little while, he simply ended up going knight f3, going back. And I, without really thinking, went knight b3. And that was the double blunder. That was a huge blunder because I now allowed him to do a beautiful tactic, a tactic I wish would not exist. But a tactic that is so beautiful because as you can see his bishop is in the same diagonal as my queen and he now has this brilliant move knight g5 and oh the moment he did it I knew I was in trouble because now he's threatening two things. He's threatening to go knight takes f6. And then after I take on f6, checkmating me on h7, and he's also threatening knight takes f6 and winning my queen. And I cannot both move my queen and defend the checkmate. So I actually had to take his knight, but now after he takes back, he's both threatening my queen and threatening checkmate, and there is no way for me to save my queen. There is no way for me to defend right now. It is just game over. That was just such a beautiful tactic that he found and I couldn't. believe it and it was just so crazy and there I lost on time and then I resigned and yeah and he was telling me how this knight a5 idea was maybe not the best and he was right I should have gone for another knight idea but anyways that was that game he found a beautiful tactic and I lost and I really wanted to show you that tactic. I was shocked when he made that move, but I also knew instantly that I was in trouble. So it just shows how quickly a chess game can change, but I hope that you enjoyed this game. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you all in my next video. Bye-bye!